1 Pythagoras; Philosophic Romanticism.
I PYTHAGORAS; PHILOSOPHIC ROMANTICISM Numbers, wherein we moderns see nothing but figures, are not so dead and inert as we have decreed. A strange sentence, indeed, which we have not passed on anything else in this vast universe, wherein we pique ourselves on finding, singing and celebrating only "Life!" Number also is a part of Life. It is Rhythm. Perhaps it shows itself even more essentially living than most of our sensations, and, far from being a mere convention established by prehistoric arithmeticians, has as its origin in ourselves the very beat of our hearts. This exclusion of Number presents an incomprehensible anomaly. All our sciences, Astronomy, Physics, Mechanics, Chemistry, are based on Mathematics, whose importance increases from day to day; Philosophy alone, although open to all these sciences which everywhere encompass it, remains inhospitably closed to the master of them all. Upon Number alone and its nature does Philosophy refuse to meditate. It is perhaps needless to seek further for the cause of that decadence into which it is irresistibly slipping, and of its visible impotence before moral and metaphysical questions, which it persists in treating according to the worn-out processes of a banal lifeless scholasticism, in the paltry style of an old professor of rhetoric attempting to produce literature. And this because, since the time of Pythagoras, we have completely lost our perception of the simple, warm, natural life of Numbers. That great thinker, earliest of the philosophers, has been ridiculously deformed by legend. We should not forget, nevertheless, that from his school came Aeschylus, creator of Tragedy, Epicharmus, founder of Comedy, and a hundred other poets, mathematicians, artists, legislators, naturalists, all creators, who in reality constituted the Hellenic grandeur, the origin of our civilization. A Socrates, a Plato, an Aristotle represent, in fact, but the second outpouring of Greek thought. Again, we should recall the unanimous testimony of the ancients. This same Pythagoras whom we see, on the solemn eve of the Medic Wars, inspiring the minds of their heroes and of the geniuses of the Age of Pericles, is believed to have revived the tradition of teachings attributed, more or less authentically, to that Orpheus whom we find, near the epoch of Troy, in the dawn of that other great epoch of Greece, which gave us Homer and Hesiod. Is it surprising to discover that in this Orpheo- Pythagoric teaching, although today disdained, there lies a treasure of human thought? Unhappily, Orphism and Pythagorism have only come down to us disfigured in the most ridiculous fashion, first by the Alexandrine charlatans and later by those of the Renaissance, that is to say, by the decay of the two great original eras of Europe, the Greek and the Mediaeval. This does not at all signify, however, that at the end of the first the authentic documents of Pythagorism had disappeared. On the contrary, we find the powerful influence of the doctrine, its spirit of ANALOGY, and particularly of numerical analogy, in almost all the best thought of the Middle Ages (notably in theological writings), thought thereby far removed from our own, but thereby akin to that of Greece and Asia. It is possible that the last Pythagoric works may have finally disappeared, with so many others, at the time of the Hundred Years War and the Turkish invasion of Europe. Let us not forget that, ignorant as we still are of mediaeval literature, we can necessarily form but a very incomplete idea of its sources. Only the survival of these old Hellenic writings can explain that extraordinary MELANGE of marvellously suggestive passages, otherwise inaccountable, and of base absurdities which forms the "hermetic" books of the 15th and 16th centuries. It was said, indeed, even during the lifetime of Cornelius Agrippa, that intriguing boaster whose OCCULT PHILOSOPHY contains, besides its superstitious imbecilities, the curious relationships of his Analogical Tables, that this noisy wizard had merely plagiarized unintelligently a manuscript of the Arabian Picatrix, which was at that time to be found in the library of the Kings of Spain. It is needless to recall how many Greek works have come to us by way of the Arabs, or how many have been lost which they possessed. The philosophy of the ancients comes to us today with its most vigorous half amputated, so to speak. By a singular tradition, the philosophic teaching of modern peoples disguises this formidable mutilation. It invites us to glide over so disturbing a subject. Nevertheless, if ever that prodigious lacuna should be filled by the reappearance of the Pythagoric writings so esteemed by all the Greek thinkers (for neither Aristotle nor Plato, nor any of their rivals of the old school, manifested any of our disdain for them) a veritable revolution, comparable to that of romanticism in literature, will be produced in our philosophy, so erudite, subtile, purist like the last classics, difficult, minute and particular, but curtailed, narrow and "scholastic" in the etymological sense of the word! Great is the distance from these mere academic games to those antique doctrines each of which founded a civilization! The Greek sage appears intimately and naturally mingled with the tumultuous life of the people, which he expressed and transformed, almost in the fashion of the founders of our religious orders. Whereas, coldly withdrawn from the public to the fireside and the library, our philosophy of professors and of themes, by its evident impotence, yields place to the gross empiricism of the modern leaders of men and of those writers and artists who inspire them. Between the imitation of defunct ages and the ugliness of formless personality the last three centuries have oscillated, with no bold new harmonies to meet the storms of the future. To the Greek so admirably endowed, and also, it must be remembered, not yet desiccated and hardened by an artificial and inelastic learning, mathematical formulae sang like chords. The smallest new discovery of this kind, instead of being limited to scientific and mechanical applications, penetrated him throughout, thrilled his nerves and muscles and communicated its vibration to all his thoughts, by its analogies, inexact, no doubt, as they always are, and as he knew, but so much the more fecund. When the Infinite opens itself to our souls, the classification of their responding impulses which is least artificial is that which assumes a mathematical character, since it is Mathematics alone which challenges the Infinite to all possible combinations. Do we begin to perceive what I seek to suggest rather than to demonstrate the profundity of the Pythagorean conception? It is certain that no treason could be more fatal to it, and in fact none has been, than the inept numerical superstitions of Alexandrine and of modern hermeticism. For to limit certain numbers to some narrow meaning, to reduce to some exclusive property their enormous fecundity, is to go precisely contrary to the great Thinker to whom these vile charlatans pretend to be attached, but whose deadly parasites they are. Even M. Chaignet, in his conscientious work on Pythagoras, has done little but strive with the superstitions which these gentry have heaped about this great name, and whose crying contradictions dishearten this excellent scholar, even while he seems to perceive behind them, though he lacks the power to seize it amid their conflicts something lofty, rational, philosophic; in a word, truly Greek. In short, the monument yet remains to be raised by our own strength. I believe that the surest method will be the humblest: to gather patiently, in a sort of dictionary, the numerical analogies, extending them progressively to all things with which we are acquainted, at least as far as possible; then to seek in some way to multiply them by means of the known laws of arithmetical combinations; to note with care, on the other hand, the point at which each one of these analogies ceases to be exact, and to try to trace thus a sort of provisory limit which will give them a contour, a physiognomy less arbitrary and especially less limited than that inflicted by superstition upon the numbers 13, 7, etc.